I’ve been working on a new web application over the last month whenever I can find some spare time. I had initially started the project using Grails, but I had difficulty getting past the scaffolding. Besides, my reading seems to always come back to Grails performance issues so I figured I’d just start with a tried & true Java Enterprise stack: Spring, Hibernate, Spring MVC, and MySQL.
I spent the last few weeks dealing with the model, DAO, service, and controller layers. I’m aiming for a solid RESTful API consuming and producing JSON from the onset. I got all that to work seemingly well and am now actually ready to focus on views so I wrote my first JSP in about 10 years yesterday:
<%@ include file="taglibs.jsp"%>
<head>
<title><fmt:message key="home.title"/></title>
</head>
<body class="home">
<fmt:message key="home.heading"/>
</body>
Now in my maven /src/main/resources directory, I have a message.properties file containing the following:
home.properties=Home
home.heading=Hello World!
Finally, I added the following to my MVC Configuration file (I’m using JavaConfig as opposed to the old school Spring XML):
@Bean
public MessageSource getMessageSource() {
ResourceBundleMessageSource source = new ResourceBundleMessageSource();
source.setBasename("messages");
return source;
}
Not really any rocket science here, folks… This is pretty much standard based on the Spring documentation and about half a dozen blog entries. The only difference with my configuration and what I found online was that the MessageSource was being configured using XML.
I spent several hours trying to get this to work but the view would render with ???home.title??? and ???home.heading??? and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what the problem was. I know that the bean was getting instantiated because I added a breakpoint there… Finally I tried actually retrieving the MessageSource bean in the controller from the ApplicationContext. Instead, I got a big fat exception that the bean was not found. So I changed my configuration to retrieve the bean by name instead of by class:
@Bean(name="messageSource")
public MessageSource getMessageSource() {
ResourceBundleMessageSource source = new ResourceBundleMessageSource():
source.setBasename("messages"):
return source;
}
Just like magic, the JSP view now rendered just fine! Simply naming the bean ‘messageSource’ resolved a problem I had been tackling for several hours. I realize this blog doesn’t have an insane amount of traffic, but hopefully this will help somebody who runs into the same problem I did.
